PCT Day 162 – A Brutal sort of Beauty

Campsite 2515 to campsite at mile Dolly Vista Trail Camp (2532)

The tent is covered in cold condensation when I wake. Our little camp hidden next to a rushing creek is well secluded from the morning sun whose rays cannot penetrate the chill. Even after an unusually long pack up time, during which we work to delay the inevitable moment when we must leave our warm bubble and venture outside, it is still cold. I wait until the absolute last minute before stripping off my puffy jacket, packing it away in a hurry and starting to hike before l can fully appreciate how cold my arms are.

However, immediately the trail begins to climb. Winding through thick forests below the massive jagged shoulders of Glacier Peak. Below the trees roll towards a precipice and drop sharply from view, above they cede to the granite and snow and sky. The world is two toned, green on bottom, grey blue on top. Smoke from wildfires has blown in on the morning breeze, dulling our views and smudging the pale peaks into the sky. We climb steeply up and over our first ridge of the day on trail that tilts towards the valley floor as though wishing us to slide right off and down into the dark forest. Our first climb deposits us at a small creek. Rushing over bright green moss and achingly cold against my fingers as I filter water. With sudden ferocity the sun blasts from around the ridge, flooding the creek with light and vaporizing morning dew instantaneously into humidity.

We climb again. And again. Up towards the sky where the trees cannot grow and even the green grass is now tinged with the yellow of oncoming fall. From on high the skyline in all directions is crowded with broken grey teeth of mountains. We are nothing more than small mammals standing in the center of a giant earthen maw waiting to snap closed and swallow us whole. The land here is beautiful in a way that rings of eons of cold, ice, and the grinding of rock and water until the earth is worn away into shattered spires and deep chasms.

With no where left to go we drop into one of these chasms. Winding down down down to a river of milky white which carries the smallest bits of mountain down towards the sea in the slow unrelenting manner that it has always shaped this land. And when there is no more down to be had we again look briefly towards the sky and climb into the forest on a trail that marches this way and that. Switchbacking relentlessly until time and distance fall out of relation to each other. The river grows smaller and smaller below us, but the sky is ever as big, the trees ever as grand, and looking up only serves to tell us that we have a long way to go. So I chose not to look, only to walk with slow measured steps until the ground tilts the other way at last. And my legs unspool underneath me. I am a rag doll, a puppet with floppy limbs and joints made of string ambling along the downhill like learning to walk again. Finally coming to rest beside a happy steam rushing down in the warm afternoon air, a joyous burbling sound. Food and drink, simple sweet pleasure before the going.

It hurts to move again, as it almost always does. But I prod myself to my feet, heading towards the horizon where a plume of white mars the great blue sky. What is that now? With so many kinds of light trapped in deep valleys or else ricocheting from rock and snow, what is that smear which eats away at the sky?

A fire. A new one by the looks of it. With another angry friend burning nearby. We stand with Autopilot and Roadrunner for a long time looking at maps and compass trying to decipher the squiggles of topography and if that fire is burning right in our path. The plan to hike down into another dark valley is put on hold and in the end seven of us huddle on a ridge top campsite and watch the fire spread across the hillside. Two valleys over and yet no airplanes. Does anybody other than us know about this fire? Who is there to relay this information to the proper parties if not us, so removed from contact with the outside world as we are now?

The setting sun darkens the sky, concealing the jagged teeth of mountains that surround us on all sides. What to do, what to do, what to do. Asking is all we can do as bright red flares from across the valley, piercing through the smoke which we can see but not yet smell. It is beautiful in its own brutal way.